


You Steal the Air out of My Lungs (You Make Me Feel It)

by prosciutto



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: Co-workers, Enemies to Friends to Lovers, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-18
Updated: 2017-06-18
Packaged: 2018-11-15 15:50:34
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,815
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11234199
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/prosciutto/pseuds/prosciutto
Summary: But then he opens his big, stupid mouth, and suddenly all of her feelings of goodwill go up in smoke, because Bellamy Blake is, undoubtedly, a massiveasshole.He won’t stop calling her Princess, for one, and makes a face every time she so much as asks a question about the cash register. The constant jibes about her having gotten the job due to nepotism (so their boss may also be her mom’s fiancé,sueher) certainly don’t help either, and he actually laughs when a book display falls on her foot.Suffice to say, he is definitely not her favorite person. On particularly bad days, she entertains a fantasy or two of shoving him down a flight of stairs. On worse ones, she dreams of pushing him down a manhole.Still, murderous tendencies aside, Clarke doesn’t mean toactuallyrun him over with her car.Or: Clarke's rivalry with her co-worker takes a sharp left turn after she accidentally runs him over with her car. (And not entirely in the way she was expecting, either.)





	You Steal the Air out of My Lungs (You Make Me Feel It)

**Author's Note:**

> The prompt was ‘I know that you think I hate you but I swear to God I didn’t mean to hit you with my car.' which is obviously very bellarke, so here you guys go. Enjoy! x

The funny thing is, under  _ entirely  _ different circumstances, Clarke’s pretty sure that she and Bellamy Blake could have been friends.

The first time she meets him, Kane is introducing them and he’s supposed to be showing her the ropes, since it’s her first day at the bookstore. He has a well-worn copy of  _ Howl’s Moving Castle  _ sticking out of his bag, freckles, and dark, messy curls that Clarke _ really  _ wants to run her fingers through. (She’s... pretty intrigued, if she’s being entirely honest.) 

But then he opens his big,  _ stupid _ mouth, and suddenly all of her feelings of goodwill go up in smoke, because Bellamy Blake is, undoubtedly, a massive  _ asshole.  _

He won’t stop calling her Princess, for one, and makes a face every time she so much as asks a question about the cash register. The constant jibes about her having gotten the job due to nepotism (so their boss may also be her mom’s fiancé, _sue_ her) certainly don’t help either, and he actually _laughs_ when a book display falls on her foot. 

Suffice to say, he is _definitely_ not her favorite person. On particularly bad days, she entertains a fantasy or two of shoving him down a flight of stairs. On worse ones, she dreams of pushing him down a manhole.

Still, murderous tendencies aside, Clarke doesn’t mean to _actually_ run him over with her car. 

“Oh my god, _Bellamy_ ,” she breathes, dropping down onto the ground next to him. She can already feel her brain going into overdrive trying to assess the situation before her, all while holding back the urge to empty the contents of her stomach on the street. There’s no blood, from what she can tell, but the sickening crunch of him landing on her windshield still rings in her ears. “Are you okay? Where does it hurt?”

He groans, his head falling back with an audible  _ thump.  _ “Everywhere.” 

“That’s — not helpful, if I’m being honest.” 

That actually pulls a scowl out of him, which Clarke takes as a promising sign that he’s not grievously injured. “You ran me over with your car _ ,  _ Princess. Forgive me if I’m not exactly in the most accommodating of moods.”

She can’t quite help her scoff at that. “My bad,” she snaps, throwing up her hands frustratedly, “I just assumed  _ asshole _ was your default setting.”

“Only for you, Princess,” he says dryly, his expression morphing into a wince as he pulls himself up by his elbows, waving away her yelps for him to  _ keep still,  _ “Now, if we’re done here, I believe we have a shift that starts in fifteen.”

“Work,” she gapes, “I just ran you over with my  _ car,  _ and you want to go in for  _ work _ .”

Bellamy gives an unimpressed sniff at that. “Well, not all of us have trust funds to live off now, don’t we?”

And just like that, all the residual sympathy and worry she has for Bellamy Blake evaporates into non-existence. “You know what?” she scoffs, stomping after him, “Consider this a lesson learned. The next time I run you over with my car, I’ll —”

He doubles over in pain then, effectively ending her tirade as she rushes forward to steady him. 

“Is it your ribs?” she demands, pressing her fingers tentatively against his side, making him hiss in pain. “Shit. Okay, I’m taking you to the hospital.”

“I’m fine,” he says mulishly, gingerly lifting at the edge of his shirt. A dark, shapeless bruise stares back at her, wide enough to cover the expanse of his stomach. “See? No blood, no foul.”

Biting back a snappy retort, she sighs instead, assumes the most pleading expression she can muster under the circumstances. (To be fair, it’s not  _ that  _ hard. She hates the guy, but it’s not like she wants him dead.) “Bellamy, please. It’ll make me feel a lot better if you’d just let me take you to the hospital to get it looked at.” 

He narrows his eyes over at her, sizing her up. “Aren’t you pre-med?” he shoots back, “Shouldn’t you be able to tell if I require medical assistance?” 

It’s hard to keep her surprise from showing at that, considering she didn’t think that he was paying attention in the first place. He  _ remembered. _ (She’s not sure what to make of this, really.) “Used to be,” she says instead. “I dropped out to do art.”

He makes a small, noncommittal noise in response. “So, that’s why you’re working at a bookstore? Because you’re in some sort of  _ Eat, Pray, Love _ phase where you think you need a  _ change  _ from your usual humdrum life to get over yourself?” 

“That’s—  _ no _ .” She frowns, shaking her head. Then, with barely concealed impatience, “Look, that’s not the point. Will you please just get in so I can take you to the hospital?”

“Fine,” he says after a beat, hobbling over to the passenger side all while muttering lowly under his breath. “That is, if you can get us there without running over someone else.”

She slams the door shut behind him, hard enough to make the windows rattle.  _ Dick.  _

 

+

Bellamy’s not much of a talker, so she’s expecting the ride to the hospital to be in sullen, albeit much welcome _ ,  _ silence. 

What she doesn’t expect is for him to reach into his bag and pull out a pair of glasses, breathing a sigh of relief as he slides them onto his face. 

“What?” he snarls, when he catches her staring. 

She flushes involuntarily, turning away to keep him from spotting it. Objectively, glasses are a good look on him, but she’d rather put splints under her nails than say that to his face _.  _ “Nothing. I just didn’t think you wore those.”

The tip of his ears go a little red at that. “I wear contacts, normally,” he says gruffly, turning his face away from her. “But then again, I didn’t  _ really _ think I was going to get  _ run over  _ on the one day I decided to wear my glasses out.” 

“They’re fine!” 

“Only because I had the foresight to take them off when I was getting off the bus,” he huffs, resting his forehead against the window pane. “I honestly thought the worst thing that could happen to me was fogged up lenses.” 

“So that’s why you just stumbled onto the road out of nowhere,” she says, with a pointed shake of her head, “because  _ someone  _ didn’t have their glasses on.” 

The noise he makes is distinctly disbelieving. “How is this  _ my  _ fault now?”

“Because you walked out onto the open road, half-blind,” she retorts, hitting at her blinker with more force than necessary. “I get that you hate me, but trying to get me to commit vehicular manslaughter? That’s a whole new level, buddy.”

It’s a pathetic attempt at riling him up, really, but Clarke never claimed to be the bigger person in this situation anyway. Strangely enough, he doesn’t rise to the bait, just says in a odd-sounding voice, “I don’t  _ hate _ you.”

She can’t hold back on her snort at that. “Could have fooled me.” 

“I don’t,” Bellamy insists, glaring over at her. “What I do hate, though, is that you pretty much sauntered in here and got a job without even  _ trying.  _ The rest of us don’t share the same privilege, Princess.  _ Some _ of us—”

“I did the interviews and tests, just like you did,” she interrupts, working to keep her voice steady. “And not that it _matters,_ but I didn’t even realize Kane was running this store when I submitted my application. He might have taken me in, but not as a favor to my mom considering she’s the one who cut me off in the first place.” 

He looks like he wants to say something to that, but she keeps going instead. “I need this job just as much as you do, okay? I’m trying my fucking best to keep myself afloat here, and you making my life a living  _ hell  _ every single day doesn’t help things.”

That seems to stun him into silence, at least. Satisfied, she turns away, keeping her gaze fixed on the road ahead. A few more minutes and he’ll be out of her hair, hopefully, and then she could forget that any of this ever happened.

Ten minutes stretch out to fifteen, and he finally breaks the silence just as she’s turning into the hospital’s driveway. “Milk.” 

She rubs at her ears, casting him a searching gaze. Maybe Bellamy acquired a concussion, and he’s only showing the effects now. Still, the right thing to do would be to humor him, right? “What?” 

“Milk,” he repeats, slouching lower in his seat. “It’s why your cappuccino’s don’t foam up whenever you’re on coffee duty. You don’t put enough of it.”

Clarke gapes, only manages to regain her composure a few minutes after. “Oh.”

He nods, dropping his gaze back to his lap. 

She throws the car into park, holds out for another two minutes before she tells him, tart, “ _ Atonement  _ really shouldn’t be sorted under Historical Fiction when it’s clearly a romance.”

The corners of his mouth twitch at that, as if holding back on a smile. “So you think tragic, doomed relationships are considered romance?” 

“God, it is just  _ like  _ you to say that.” 

 

+

(They have an… understanding, after that, which is strange to say the least, but she supposes that’s what happens after you’ve spent four consecutive hours sitting with someone in a hospital waiting room, fighting over the legitimacy of health pamphlets. She wins, but only because he gets grossed out by the pictures of ticks on page six.)

 

+

Three months post truce, it’s almost too easy to fall into a friendship with Bellamy Blake.

She discovers that they have differing tastes in literature, for one, so she ends up spending an inordinate amount of time trying to convince him into reading her favorites. He likes thrillers and mythology and basically anything that looks as if it had been printed in size six Times New Roman ( _ugh_ ) but she gets him to try out _Austenland,_ which he admits to liking after much prodding on her part. She tries out _The Odyssey,_ too, at his insistence, and has to spend the rest of the day after, listening to him grouch about it. (It’s hard to mind, though, considering how he’s pretty cute when he’s agitated.)

She learns that he’s a history major, that he prefers tea to coffee, and that he likes taking caring of people. Scratch that, he  _ loves  _ it. He is a big brother through and through, and it shows in the way he nags at her whenever she skips lunch, or how he brings in extra umbrellas to work every time it rains because he doesn’t want anyone else getting wet.

“That’s not even the worse of it,” Miller points out, after he catches sight of the numerous protein bars Bellamy had left by her station accompanied with a post-it note reminding her to  _ eat, Princess.  _ “One time, I told him I got a C for a paper that I didn’t really care for, and he proceeded to give me a rousing, forty-five minute long speech on how grades really meant nothing anyway.”

“Yeah,” she manages, sneaking a surreptitious peek over at him. He’s sitting cross-legged by the Children’s section, engrossed in a game of Tic Tac Toe with one of the kids, and she has to bite back a smile at the sight of it. “Sounds like him.” 

(It’s unrealistic, at this point, not to have any feelings for him whatsoever, but she’s just— actively trying not to think about it, really.) 

The sound Miller makes is distinctly disparaging. “Wow. You have it  _ bad, _ don’t you?”

“ _ Shut up _ ,” she hisses, swatting at him as he ducks nimbly out of the way, sniggering. “Don’t you have better things to do? Like your  _ job _ ?” 

“How am I supposed to when you’re still here?” he retorts, grabbing at his nametag before fixing it onto his shirt with a grimace. “Get going, Griffin. The stockroom is calling your name.”

Scowling, she pockets the protein bars, flipping him off as she goes. Everyone hated stock-keeping and spending hours in the musty, too-small space of the storeroom, but it was a necessary evil that they all had to go through at some point. 

Clarke didn’t hate it, really. Kane didn’t mind whenever she got the radio going, and besides, it was nice to be alone with her thoughts for a few hours.

She’s fixing price stickers onto their latest shipment of dictionaries when she hears it— the beat of a familiar tune, punctuated by a crackle of static or two. Laughing, she throws her hands up, shaking to the beat as she reaches over to turn the volume up. She used to dance to this song with her dad all the time, to the point where he had to buy the vinyl for it. 

Shimmying her hips, she hums along as she grabs at the price gun once more, spinning on her heel—

Only to collide straight into someone, making her  _ shriek  _ in surprise.

“Jesus _ , _ ” she gasps, and she would have lost her balance if two hands didn’t catch at her elbows, hauling her back upright once more. “What the—  _ Bellamy _ .” 

He grins down at her, shaking his head. “Watch where you’re going, Princess.” 

“You’re the one that came in out of nowhere,” she huffs, arms winding around his neck instinctively as she sways on the spot. “What are you doing here?” 

“Thought you could use a little pick me up.” He shrugs, jerking his chin towards the brown bag on the shelf. “Croissants and coffee. But you know,” his lips quirk up into a smirk, then, making her flush, “I got a little distracted by the view.”

She sniffs, grazing a hand against his chest. “Please. I’m a  _ great  _ dancer. Better than you, probably.” 

“If you say so, Princess.”

“Well, I recognize a challenge when I hear one,” she says, backing up slightly and tossing her hair exaggeratedly, making him laugh. “C’mon, Blake. Show me your moves.” 

He gives a mock-solemn nod of his head at that, sighing, “You know, I’m not sure if you’re ready for my moves, Clarke.” 

“ _ Chicken _ .” 

The next song starts up, a faster one, and she bursts out into giggles when he begins to dance, twirling clumsily and nearly knocking over a shelf in his haste. She grabs onto his shoulders to steady him before he can fall over, his hands going to her waist as she laughs, pressing their foreheads together.

“I think I would have warmed to you a lot sooner if you’d just danced at me like  _ this _ the first time we met.” 

He chuckles at that, his breath warm on her face. “And embarrassed myself further? No thanks.”

It takes a few seconds for the words to sink in, and she frowns, arching a brow over at him quizzically. “Further?”

He glances up at her from between a dark fan of lashes, his expression inscrutable. “Yeah,” he says tightly, his fingers twitching slightly at her waist. “Look, I may have hated your guts, but I respected you, okay? I thought you were fucking smart and determined and gorgeous and I guess— I don’t know. I just didn’t want to make more of an ass of myself than I already did.”

It’s near impossible to hear anything over the wild thumping of her pulse, her breath catching when he meets her gaze. “Oh,” she says stupidly, biting at her lip. 

He manages a nonchalant shrug in response, shooting her an easy, half-smile. It feels like he’s trying to give her an out, somehow, already drawing back as the song comes to an end—

She tightens her grip on him instead, keeping him close. “Do you still feel the same?” 

He blinks over at her, throat bobbing as he regards her. (It’s possibly the longest minute of her life.)

“I couldn’t help it if I tried,” he says finally, his voice breaking slightly on the word, and it’s all she needs to push up on her toes and  _ kiss  _ him, twisting her fingers in his hair and sighing into his mouth when he returns it with equal fervor, his hand coming up to cup at her cheek.

She pulls away when the need to breathe gets too much, leaning into his touch. 

“So,” she laughs, twisting her neck slightly to kiss at his palm.  

“So,” he parrots, bumping his nose against hers affectionately. He’s  _ smiling  _ so much. “That was something.”

She groans, swatting at his chest playfully. “Well, suffice to say, I’m glad we don’t hate each other more.” 

He makes a impatient noise at that, the sound a laugh more than anything, making warmth bloom in her chest. “For the last time, Princess,” he murmurs, before leaning over to kiss her senseless once more. “I never  _ hated  _ you.” 


End file.
